a. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a feeding apparatus for crown caps, screw caps and the like, hereinafter referred to as "caps", which are made of magnetic substance. More particularly, a invention relates to the feeding apparatus for such caps of bottles and the like, in which the caps held disorderly in the hopper of the apparatus can be fed one by one in good order in a continuous manner to a cap receiving device of a cap placing apparatus such as a crowner or capper.
B. Description of the Prior Art
In the cap feeding apparatuses of the prior art, as the selecting means for the positioning of the caps in order to feed them with the proper sides out into a chute which is connected to a cap placing apparatus, there have been proposed several kinds of apparatuses in which, for example, disorderly arranged caps from the hopper are dropped on a rotating disk and said caps are separated by centrifugal force due to the difference of the friction to the disk surface between the caps in right positions and those in wrong positions, thereby the caps with a certain positioning are led to the chute. Further, in such conventional apparatus, the operator of the apparatus must usually remove the stagnated caps from the guide passage in order to prevent the accumulation of the caps at the guide passage which is connected to the cap placing apparatus. The conventional cap feeding apparatus produces loud noise. In addition to that, the hopper which holds the caps must be placed on the top portion of the apparatus and descending passages for caps must be generally employed. Therefore, the arrangement and installation of the apparatus are somewhat restricted. Further, the function of such feeding apparatus is not always sufficiently reliable in its operation. Still further, the work for removing the accumulated caps in the cap guide passage reduces the workability very much as well as it is troublesome for the operators.